Women and Indians: The Last of the Mohicans and the Captivity Tradition

Abstract

ity, this large genre remains somewhat isolated within American literary history-more interesting to bibliographers and ethnohistorians than to critics.' Some recent studies of captivity narratives have ably elaborated basic ideas first presented by Roy Harvey Pearce a generation ago; new and highly imaginative approaches to the captivities have also been attempted, but the critics' eagerness to fit one or more narratives into universal mythic structures or into psychosexual theories of American culture has often distracted them from the fundamental question about the captivities-the specific influence of this vast and enormously popular genre upon the development of literature in the United States.2 Yet it is only logical that such influence must have existed. Bibliographers have catalogued more than a thousand separate captivity titles, published fairly steadily from the sixteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth; many of the best-known narratives were reprinted in dozens of editions.3 For roughly a hundred years, from 1750 to 1850, the Indian captivity was one of the chief staples of popular literary culture; as Phillips D.